All the Pretty Colours

This evening I went to the most civilised of the weeks Halloweenish events, a little gathering with friends, fireworks and horror movies. I’ve been thinking about making monster cupcakes ever since I saw My Little Mochi’son Halloween and this seemed like the perfect occasion.

I’m not much of a marshmallow fan though and I didn’t want to buy one of those giant bags and have to use the leftovers so I used smarties for the eyes and milkybar buttons broken up for the teeth. Mine aren’t quite as cute as the mistress of adorable’s, but they are more colourful. Even if I was a little dissapointed that the all- natural-colouring-smarties have lost the best colours – the blue and red.

Truthfully I do think getting the artificial colouring out of these things is a good thing, the stuff still makes me crazy, but I was a little sad that they weren’t quite as colourful as I remembered. These actually turned out much better than I was expecting for the amount of effort I put in, they’ve totally been added to mental list of fun things to do if / when I have kids (please tell me that I’m not the only one who isn’t planning on having kidlets any time soon who has such a list).

I love, love fireworks, even though rationally they are the most absolutely pointless thing, not to mention dangerous. Speaking of safety, I was much further back than these photos make it seem.

Home fireworks displays can never really compete with the bi-annual giant ones at the castle here and fireworks night will always mean the end of the festival rather than Guy Fawkes night to me. In fact it was only when I went to uni with lots of English people that it clicked that Guy Fawkes night was supposed to be a celebration of the foiling of the gunpowder plot rather than of the attempt to destroy the houses of parliament, it always confused me when Blue Peter made him out to be the bad guy!

We never had fireworks at home when I was a kid, but we always had sparklers and a part of me still thinks that they’re more fun. They’re definitely more photogenic, although my attempts to get my friend Jen to photograph me writing my name didn’t exactly work out. Still pretty though. There are more photos on flickr, I got a little carried away. Ooh and can you spot the handknit in these photos?

Pricing patterns has always been one of the hardest parts of designing and I’ve often felt like the “standard” price of knitting patterns is both lower than other similar products (eg. indie sewing patterns) and doesn’t really reflect the amount of work that goes into them. At the same time, it’s totally fair to worry that rising pattern prices will price people out.